ing, not with standing his Ill Treatment: If he has not, I begg leave to tell him, that it is mean for him to twit me with Benefits that I am no ways beholden to him for.
Because of his attack on the arbitrary and corrupt administration of the British Colonial Governor Crosby, Zenger had been arrested on the charge of seditious libel. In the trial which followed, Zenger was fortunate in having to defend him Andrew Hamilton, probably the ablest lawyer of Philadelphia. During the most interesting trial several departures were made from the legal procedure of the past in libel suits. These have been outlined by Melville E. Stone, General Manager of the Associated Press, as follows:
First, the jury took the bit in their teeth and asserted their right to be the sole judges of both the law and the facts. Second, they decided that the oldtime rule that "the greater the truth the greater the libel" was an unwise one. Zenger was acquitted. And so it came about that there was a famous revolution in the colonial law. The judge ceased to be the sole arbiter of an editor's fate, and the truth when published from good motives and justifiable ends became an adequate defence for the journalist brought to bar. This meant that for the first tune in the world's history the freedom of the press, so far as such freedom was consistent with public rights, was established. The seed which John Milton had sown a century before, when he wrote his famous plea for "unlicensed printing," had come to fruition. Gouverneur Morris said this verdict was "the dawn of that liberty which afterward revolutionized America."
END OF ZENGER'S CAREER
Zenger was made Public Printer for the Province of New York in 1737, and a year later was given the same office for the Province of New Jersey. He continued, however, to bring out his Weekly Journal and lived to see the suspension of his rival, The New-York Weekly Gazette. The New-York Evening Post, the first paper of that name in the city, told of the end of Zenger's career when it published the following obituary notice on August 4, 1746:—
On Monday Evening last, departed this Life Mr. John Peter Zenger, Printer, in the 49 year of his Age; He Has left a Wife and six children behind, he was a loving Husband, and a tender Father, and his Death is much lamented by his Family and Relations.
